How to Maximize Your Content Marketing Productivity

How much time do you spend on content marketing? Defined as the creation and promotion of high-quality content that’s relevant and valuable to a specific audience, it’s a cost-effective way to attract customers to your business. According to a study conducted by Kapost, content marketing costs less than half the price of traditional outbound marketing and attracts over three times as many leads.

Content marketing takes time, however. It’s a more methodical and time-consuming process compared to outbound marketing. If you’re struggling to create and promote content in an efficient manner, consider the following tips to maximize your content marketing productivity.

Create More Evergreen Content

All forms of high-quality content can benefit your business, but evergreen content offers the greatest benefit for the least amount of work. Unlike news and current events stories, evergreen content is relevant for a prolonged period. It receives its namesake from evergreen trees, which are characterized by year-round leaf retention. An evergreen tree retains its leaves year-round, while evergreen content retains its relevance year-round.

Because it’s relevant for a prolonged period, evergreen content will drive views and user engagement long after it’s published. A how-to article, for instance, may remain relevant for several years, whereas a news article may only be relevant for a few weeks. By creating more evergreen content and less time-sensitive content, you’ll maximize your content marketing productivity.

Browse Competitors’ Websites for Inspiration

When you experience writer’s block, try browsing your competitors’ websites for inspiration on what to write to about. Depending on your business’s industry or niche, you may be vying for the same customers as dozens or even hundreds of other business websites. Taking just a few minutes to browse some of your competitors’ websites can provide you with tons of new content ideas.

In addition to manually browsing competitors’ websites, you can use the Google “site” operator to quickly search for competitors’ content. On Google, search for “site,” followed by a colon and the address of the competitor’s website. Google will display a list of all indexed web pages on the competitor’s website. You can then browse the search results to see the titles of the competitor’s content.

Focus on a Single Task 

Multitasking can negatively affect your content marketing productivity. Research shows that workers who multitask are 40 percent less productive on average than workers who focus on a single task at once. So, if you’re researching a topic to write about, don’t research other topics. If you’re designing an infographic, don’t work on other images or visual content.

Why is multitasking bad for productivity? The human brain isn’t able to shift immediately from one task to another task. Rather, it takes nearly a half-hour for the average person to refocus after temporarily abandoning a task. If you multitask when creating and promoting content, you’ll create gaps between the respective tasks in which you’ll produce little or no work.

Repurpose Existing Content

You don’t have to create all your content from scratch. You can repurpose some of your existing content to streamline your content marketing efforts. If you have a blog, for example, you can create a roundup with excerpts from and links to some of your top posts. If you have an image gallery, on the other hand, you can turn some of the images into an infographic using the appropriate overlay text.

Automate Content Publishing

While you shouldn’t automate the creation of content, you should automate its publishing. If you intend to publish three pieces of content per week, you can schedule them to publish automatically. As a result, you won’t have to manually log in to your website every other day to publish a new piece of content.

Most content management systems (CMSs) allow you to schedule the publishing of new pages and posts. In WordPress, clicking the “Edit” button next to “Publish immediately” reveals several new fields in which you can specify the month, date, year and time when you’d like to publish a page or post.

You can also automate content publishing on social media. On Facebook, you can specify the publishing date and time of a post by clicking the “Publishing Tools” tab at the top of your business’s Facebook Page. For other social media networks, as well as Facebook, you can use a third-party scheduling service like HootSuite or Buffer.

Use Your Smartphone

If you’re not using your smartphone, you’re missing out on an essential content marketing tool that can boost your productivity. There are dozens of apps available for Android and iOS smartphones that are highly useful for content marketing. Microsoft OneNote is a free-to-use app that offers more than just basic note-taking activities. Using OneNote, you can save content ideas from the internet, create to-do lists, scan documents, set reminders and more.

Another mobile app to consider downloading on smartphone is WordPress. Assuming your website is powered by WordPress, you can use it to create or edit content on your smartphone. The WordPress app works with both hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress.

Cut Back on Performance Analytics

Analyzing the performance of your content allows you to see firsthand what works and what doesn’t, but you shouldn’t spend too much time on performance analytics. Otherwise, you may experience paralysis by analysis, which can severely hurt your content marketing productivity.

Paralysis by analysis occurs when you overanalyze a task to the point where it adversely affects your ability to complete the task. It’s a common challenge business owners face when performing content marketing. After publishing a piece of content, you’ll probably want to monitor its performance by analyzing metrics like views, social shares and comments. But if the bulk of your content marketing efforts consists of performance analytics, you’ll have less time to dedicate towards creating new content and optimizing existing content.

Content marketing is an ongoing process that requires constant work and dedication. If you stop producing new content, it will manifest in the form of fewer customers and lower sales revenue for your business. You can maximize your content marketing productivity, however, by following these tips.